{"data":{"id":"1161","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":1161,"topgoose_id":514,"tms_id":1161,"display_name":"Peter Saul","sort_name":"Saul Peter","display_date":"1934–","begin_date":"1934","end_date":"0","biography":"\u003cp\u003eUpon his return to the United States from Paris in the mid-1960s, Peter Saul’s painting took a darkly political turn, aiming a fiercely critical eye at the American establishment. He conceived of his work as a response to what he saw as the apolitical nature of much American painting at that time. Saul’s subjects from this period include the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for espionage; American consumerism; and the racism, spectacularized bloodlust, and violent misogyny that played out in the context of the Vietnam War.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/1388\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eSaigon\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e is a melee of extreme violence enacted by and on grotesquely caricatured protagonists, presented on the vast scale of history painting. In it, Vietnamese women with distended, pneumatic breasts are defiled by whistling, Coke-swigging GIs with similarly distorted bodies. The subject of the painting, outlined on the left-hand side of the picture— “White Boys Torturing and Raping the People of Saigon”—came from Saul’s imagination and was shaped by the regular news reports from Vietnam and the rhetoric of antiwar activism in the San Francisco Bay Area rather than first-hand experience of the war. The saturated colors and bulging forms show the influence of popular cartoons and psychedelic art, but Saul was also linked at the time with American funk, Pop art, and European new realism. Although he has stated that he was unaware of the work of artists such as Roberto Matta and \u003ca href=\"/artists/t4518\"\u003eMax Ernst\u003c/a\u003e,\u003cem\u003e\u0026nbsp;Saigon\u003c/em\u003e might also be linked to Surrealism in its darkly sexual content and its dreamlike compositional structure.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500005884","wikidata_id":"Q3376863","created_at":"2017-08-30T15:42:59.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-09T07:04:50.181-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/1161/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/1161/exhibitions"}}}}